Kunwar Singh of Jagdishpur
Jagdishpur, Bhojpur, Bihar
The aged zamindar of Jagdishpur leads the Danapur mutineers, besieges Arrah, fights across north India and dies at home in April 1858.
Kunwar Singh, head of the Ujjainiya Rajput house of Jagdishpur and close to eighty, was deep in debt and in dispute with the Company's revenue administration when the regiments at Danapur mutinied on 25 July 1857. He took command, and his men besieged a handful of Britons and about fifty Sikh police in a fortified house at Arrah for a week, until a relief force broke through on 3 August.
Driven from Jagdishpur, he marched west into central India and the Doab, then turned back through Azamgarh to Bihar. Crossing the Ganga in April 1858 he was hit by a bullet and, by the best-known account, cut off his own wounded hand. He beat a British column near Jagdishpur on 23 April and died on 26 April; his brother Amar Singh fought on into 1859.
British and Indian historians have weighed his age, his debts and his motives differently. In Bihar he is the central hero of 1857, remembered as Veer Kunwar Singh.
- war
- colonial